Using the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA)

The Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) is an Oracle-provided diagnostic tool that captures data about your database environment and packages it into a web page report. When submitting a Service Request to Oracle Support, you will often be asked to run the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) and upload the results. This allows the support analyst to review a lot of information about your system with very little effort on your part. It saves time by eliminating a lot of back and forth questions.

Even when not dealing with Oracle Support, I find RDA is a great tool for understanding an environment and troubleshooting issues. In my job as a Remote DBA, I often get involved in unfamiliar environments and RDA can allow me to quickly get up to speed. It provides a wealth of information in a format that is easy to use and (mostly) easy to understand.

Click on DownloadRDA and select the appropriate Zip file for your platform

Unzip the file to any location and make it executable (chmod +x)

To run RDA, just execute rda.sh from the unzipped location. Initially. it will prompt for you for information, such as the name of the database and a username that can connect to it. Follow the prompts and they are mostly self-explanatory.